When you’re researching your ancestry, it’s normal to run into problems.
Records may have been lost or destroyed, or were never filed in the first place.
Or, the records you find may be confusing; they may not match what your family told you… not at all.
Don’t panic and don’t give up!
These are typical problems we all encounter.
You can find alternatives.
For example, if you don’t have a birth certificate for the person, but you know approximately where they lived, you may find their baptismal information in a local church’s records.
Or, you may find missing information in census records… and then go back and find the birth certificate with that new information. (In the U.S., many of these kinds of records are available at the National Archives’ Vital Records collections.)
A birth may have been announced in the local newspaper. If you’re lucky (“the luck of the Irish” perhaps?), you might find what you seek at the Library of Congress’ free archives.
And so on.
I’ll list more of these kinds of resources as time permits. For now, know that what seems like a “dead end,” may not be a problem. There’s almost always a way to work around it. It may take some creative thinking, but you can do it!